Hi,
You can't connect to MySQL using your command line client? Are you connecting from the same machine? Is it configured to work on the standard port? etc. Not really questions we can help with, I'm afraid. The MySQL forums might be a better place to find answers. We use Fedora quite a bit and have not had any issues.
XAMPP doesn't create the Alfresco tables. If you can't change the my.ini file to make the tables InnoDB by default, then modify them using your admin tool so that all tables are InnoDB. You'll have major issues after your first rollback if you don't. Hibernate and the caches will expect that the underlying data will all have rolled back.
Regards